This is a fairly rambling train of thought, playing with some concepts related to our first blog post assignment:
The greatest gift the internet has given us is also one of the greatest threats to educational, copyright, and publishing institutions--or at least, a threat to institutions of this kind that hold a dominant status based on old custom and tradition, a dominant status that offers them profit and power. This gift is the (comparatively) cost-free sharing of all the world's knowledge, literature, and art. In a world where the internet is used to its highest advantage for human kind, elaborate and expensive institutions are not needed for the distribution and micromanagement of learning. Middle men are largely done away with and so lose power over their traffic and the market. Basically, the internet allows us to learn things without an inflated price tag. It allows us all the potential of becoming Renaissance men, masters of many trades. It allows precious information and highly valued creations (such as art and literature) to extend their reach beyond anything previous generations dreamed of.
One of the problems the internet has created for us is the fight between pre and post-internet concepts and stances. People, organizations, websites, etc. can take advantage of new technologies to make their information more expansive and more correct, as Wikipedia tries to do (and succeeds, a lot of the time). This allows for the growth of individuals, culture, and civilizations. Alternatively, people can ignore or half-use the internet as a place to find this information (and didactically abuse it to the next generation in hopes that they too will ignore it). This creates a stagnation of culture, individuals, and civilizations and withholds from the internet (and thus the greater part of the world and its peoples) some of the great resources and knowledges that could better reach the next generation in this form. Or, people can use the internet without a sense of obligation or an understanding of its advantages and dilute the plethora of great information available, causing the dissemination of misinformation to abound and heap itself upon the masses.
I like your term "cultural stagnation." For sure, for all the good the internet can do, it also puts endless loads of shit right at our fingertips. Maybe this doesn't bother me as often as it should--flies have to have somewhere to go, right? But it's scary to think of the direct impact misinformation, whether it's meant well or not, has on us daily. This is why I'm dubious that the internet will reshape our society, institutions, ourselves to the extent many seem to think...
ReplyDeleteYou are right we did say similar things, except I think you said it better. One thing that your post made me think of is that the internet does strip power away from affluent members of society. I view this equalization as a positive because it preserves and prospers art forms that would be strangled out by those with power and money. For example, opera was made a "high class" activity and now, a generation later, it is close to extinction because the average person could not experience and share it. Now the internet has allowed us to share and experience things that we may never have been able to before the internet existed.
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